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also, animal farm is not just anti-communist, but anti-revolution in general. the whole point of the story is if you overthrow your oppressor the new order will just become the same as the one it replaced! the story offers no suggestion of how the animals could have overthrown the farmer without the pigs becoming exactly like them, it just seems to begin and end with "never overthrown your oppressor because you'll end up right back where you started anyways." bleak and ugly story.

Not to be super English major about it, but Animal Farm was NOT an “anti-revolution” story. According to Orwell, it was inspired specifically by the Russian Revolution that led to the Stalinist regime. The story of animal farm is essentially what happened to the Russian people: they had a revolution against the tyrannical ruling class, only for the very people who had promised them freedom to turn into tyrants themselves.

The moral of the story is not “don’t have a revolution,” it’s that you should always be suspicious of those who promise you this utopian idea of freedom while still aiming to maintain power. The pigs never wanted to actually make everyone free, they just wanted to be the ones in charge. The novel details every small instance of the farm sliding further and further into fascism until it’s too late for anyone to do anything about it.

And 1984 doesn’t have much to do with communism at all. It’s about totalitarianism and fascism. There’s nothing pro-capitalist about the book. A totalitarian government like Big Brother’s could exist in either a capitalist or communist society. The point is the control they have over their people, and how important the flow of information is to that control.

George Orwell literally risked his life fighting fascists, so I think it’s pretty unfair to reduce his books to “anti-commie” propaganda. He was intensely critical of any state that maintained too much power over its people, and at the time, one of the worst examples of that was the recent communist revolution in Russia, which deposed a monarchy to install a dictator in its place.

orwell didn't pick up a gun to shoot fascists in spain alongside anarchist revolutionaries and write The book on it just so y'all can pretend the man favored inaction and the status quo.

Animal Farm is so much of a retelling of post-war Russia that when we studied it in high school (note, I'm Canadian) one of our assignments was to label which of the animals represented actual real life people, because it was FAR from subtle.

It's a prime example of how knowing the historical context of why a book was written is essential for understanding its meaning. Because yes while art is subjective and everyone interprets things in their own way, sometimes 'This pig is a stand in for Stalin, this horse is a stand in for the dismantled bourgeoisie, the farmer is a stand-in for the monarchy' is the actual point of a story.

I’d say “jeez can two people not be friends anymore?” and then I’d give one of them amnesia in which they only recognize the other above anyone else